Within the prior art, it is well known that certain individuals have hearing impairments in one or both ears. Such hearing impairments may relate to the volume of the audio information or/and spectral deficiencies. The solution in the prior art is to allow manual adjustment of a telephone to compensate for these hearing impairments. The solution suffers from a number of problems. First, if an individual has a hearing impairment in one ear but not the other, the individual will have to make the manual adjustment before transferring the telephone from one ear to the other ear during a conversation. Also, if the individual has a hearing impairment in both ears but one of the ears is less impaired, then the manual adjustment will have to be made based on which ear is used. In addition, other users of the telephone who do not have a hearing impairment will either have to readjust the telephone after the hearing impaired individual has used the telephone or use the configuration determined by the hearing impaired individual.
As a safety precaution, various governmental regulations require that a volume adjustment which increases the volume must be reset automatically at the end of a call in case a different individual uses the telephone for the next call. Illustratively, Paragraph 36 CFR Part 1194.23(g) in the Code of Federal Regulations states: “If a telecommunications product allows a user to adjust the receive volume, a function shall be provided to automatically reset the volume to the default level after every use.” The problem with these regulations is that an individual with a hearing impairment who is constantly using a telephone has to constantly make the adjustment before each call.